In A Nutshell

The Agile Manifesto refers to self-managing teams as the source of “the best architectures, requirements, and designs”. However, according to Viktoria Stray, Nils Brede Moe, and Rashina Hod, the authors of Autonomous agile teams: Challenges and future directions for research, the performance of an autonomous agile team depends not only on the ability of a team to execute its work, but also on “the organizational context provided by management”.

The authors mentioned above organised the first international workshop on autonomous agile teams at XP 2018 (The 19th International Conference on Agile Software Development). The workshop highlighted 5 of the top barriers to autonomous teams:

  1. not having clear and common goals: if there is ambiguity around the organisation’s direction of travel the team will struggle to identify where they fit. This, in turn, is likely to impact their ability to co-ordinate.

  2. lack of trust: this can be between team members and the team and management. Issues such as fixed cost pricing and other externally imposed constraints are likely to fuel divisions.

  3. too many dependencies to others: the constant need to align and coordinate with other teams, managers and stakeholders limits the teams ability to make decisions that positively impact their performance.

  4. lack of coaching and organisational support: teams can struggle to find a sustainable rhythm and managers can lack the training and/or ability to coach the team.

  5. diversity in norms: norms are informal rules that a team adopts. Without guidance, the norms that take hold in a team may not support autonomous team working and may be out of kilter with others teams that they interact with.

It can be seen from the above that leaders at all levels within an organisation have a large role to play in supporting team autonomy.

Leaders close to teams need the rigour and discipline to assess their role and their relationship with the teams. They will need to be able to help the team set their direction of travel. They will need to help the team to adopt, and rigorously adhere to, a set of disciplines that will support their autonomy. They will also need to agree what transparency is required so that the leader doesn’t need to get involved where they are not needed. Whilst considering all these factors, they will need to assess the team’s maturity to self-manage and provide support and guidance in line with this.

Peter Koning in his book, ‘Agile leadership Toolkit’ suggests a simple graph with the X-axis being ‘Maturity’ and the Y-axis being ‘Freedom’. Too much freedom with too little maturity will lead to ‘chaos’. Conversely, a mature team given little freedom will feel like they are held ‘captive’. More details can be found here.

Leaders at an organisational level will also need to play their part. They will need the rigour and discipline to continually remove constraints that may impede team automation. Legislation, reporting lines, safety and security practices, legacy systems and standardisation across the organisation are all likely to impact team autonomy.

Practices